Free Press staff writer

More than half a century ago, Julia Alvarez arrived in Vermont by train, traveling with her older sister from New York City to Ferrisburgh. She was 11 and had lived in this country about a year, having moved with her family to New York from the Dominican Republic.

City life was a “culture shock” for Alvarez. “We were shell-shocked,” she said.

The Spanish-speaking sisters who’d been learning English in a big loud city found themselves in Addison County, at a French-speaking camp on the lake, Ecole Champlain.

“I loved the beauty of the place; I think it’s when I really landed,” Alvarez, 63, said. “We had come from a small island, a rural country, and we came to New York City which sort of blew my mind. New York City was too unreal for me.

“But then to be sent to a sleepy rural place: it gave me a bridge, a way to enter. The landscape, always the beauty of the landscape, in a very serene and subtle way. There’s something very soothing about it.”

The Vermont landscape, indeed Addison County, has exhibited its pull on Alvarez — a writer who lives in Weybridge — in the five decades since.

Her connection to Vermont, where she has lived about half her life, will be formally honored at the Burlington Book Festival. The ninth annual festival, which starts Friday night, is dedicated to Alvarez, an author of novels, poems, essays and more. The opening ceremony at Main Street Landing will feature a reading by Alvarez.

“I felt a little awkward (about the honor),” she said. “My teachers are here. My mentors, my muses are here; the people I look up to. Someone points to you and you look over your shoulder. Surely they mean someone behind me.”

“Anybody who gets up there is sort of the face of a huge community behind them,” Alvarez continued, speaking of Vermont’s community of writers. “What we’re trying to do is create a culture and a community that’s rich for all of us.”

Some years after her childhood summer at camp, Alvarez returned to Vermont to attend Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She was a 19-year-old student from Connecticut College.

(Page 2 of 3)

Landscape and literature, this time, made an impression on Alvarez. She was buoyed by the sense of belonging that came from being with people who shared her interest, her “obsession.”

“You have this passion, and you kind of feel a little embarrassed in regular company,” Alvarez said. “You’re sort of odd that way, and at Bread Loaf everybody else was that way too, people of all different ages.

“Next to me (in the dorm) was a nun on one side, and the other side a very attractive woman and she had male guests in her room at night. They were both passionate about writing.”

Alvarez got it in her mind that she would transfer to Middlebury College. Immediately. Never mind that the fall semester was set to start in a matter of weeks.

“I came down to the admissions office and said I want to go here,” Alvarez recalled. She was told the deadline for transfer students is December.

“The Saturday before school started I got a call in Queens asking if I still wanted to come,” Alvarez said. “I was obviously this passionate would-be writer. He took a risk on me.”

She was referring to Fred Neuberger, the former dean of admissions at Middlebury who died in 2011.

“When I saw him I would say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Neuberger.’”

Grateful these many years later to the place (and its people) that welcomed her as a writer, Alvarez will read at the book festival’s opening ceremony from her 2012 nonfiction book, “A Wedding in Haiti: The Story of a Friendship.”

The book is relevant to Alvarez’s life in Vermont for its themes of connection, she said.

“In some ways, the spirit of Vermont — of neighborliness and a kind of social justice, and these ideas of sustainability and how to nurture the land and the people — is part of what drives me,” Alvarez said. “It’s part of a philosophy, a state of mind, that you carry out of state and out of country, too.”

(Page 3 of 3)

The Vermont state of mind stayed with Alvarez during a kind of “migrant” writing period, as she described it. She had teaching jobs at Andover, the prep school in Massachusetts, and later at the University of Illinois.

In each instance, when the chance came to return to Vermont for teaching jobs — temporary positions — Alvarez accepted.

She published her first book, a poetry volume called “Homecoming” in the early 1980s, when Alvarez lived in an apartment on Green Street in Burlington and taught at the University of Vermont.

A second edition was published in 1996, an event Alvarez writes about on her web site:

“I wrote an afterword for this second edition, recalling how I freaked when this, my first book, was published. I wanted to go out and buy all copies of the book before anyone could read it. I laugh now, but it reminds me how terrified we women were in the not so long ago past to have public voices. “

In 1991, Alvarez published her first novel, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” That year she received tenure at Middlebury: migrant no longer. She is a writer-in-residence at the college.

Alvarez still talks with fondness, even passion, about the years she held rather different positions at Middlebury: working at the Bread Loaf snack bar, babysitting the children of faculty members.

Summers in Vermont were more interesting, more appealing, to Alvarez at that time than her life at home in the city.

“Who would want to go back to New York and be sort of at home in that strict immigrant household, where as a girl you couldn’t do anything but help Mommy out or go to Papi’s office,” Alvarez said. “They were so protective.”

Her father, Eduardo Alvarez, was a doctor who had a small clinic in Brooklyn. His patients were Spanish-speaking.

“They’d come to the office and hang out all day,” Alvarez said. “They’d come and have me, the English major, fill out all their forms. I loved it because there were so many stories. They would find their way into my books.”

Difficult and lonely as it was for Alvarez to leave her childhood – and extended family – in the Dominican Republic, she believes she wouldn’t have become a writer had she stayed in that country, Alvarez said. She talks about this phenomenon with her students.

“I tell them sometimes it’s the things that are really hard, that break apart a whole way of being, that give you an opportunity to put it back together in a more expansive way,” she said.

Further, she left an oral culture and found a written one.

“Here in the loneliness of a new culture, and having to learn a new language, I discovered a world of storytelling that was written down,” she said. “I found it between the covers of books.”